Thursday, March 3, 2011

Thursday is such a tease sometimes

When the alarm went off this morning, I was convinced it was Friday, the eve of the weekend. Somewhere between turning the alarm off and emerging from the shower, I pieced together that it was Thursday and there was still quite a bit to endure before the weekend.

The Dilemma: I've been reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun for over a week now and am closing in on the end of the third book. Yesterday, the UPS man dropped a complication on my doorstep: Butcher's Moon, the last of the Parker books from the original run. My first impulse is to finish Sword of the Lictor, devour Butcher's Moon like a starving piranha, and pick up Citadel of the Autarch when I'm finished. There are reasons I'm apprehensive about doing this.

Momentum: The last time I put down the Book of the New Sun, I didn't pick it up again for over three years. Gene Wolfe's not something I can easily start again once I've stopped.

Momentum II: I have all of the other Parker books lined up for consumption and have been waiting on Butcher's Moon for over six months. I'm afraid of a feeding frenzy once I start following Parker's capers again.

Path of Least Resistance: As I intimated in #1, Gene Wolfe's not a light read. I afraid that once I stop, I'll be binging on crime books until I run out, drawn by their comparitvely cotton candy-like weight and won't be motivated to return to the rump roast that is the Book of the New Sun.

Looks like I'm sticking with the Book of the New Sun until it's finished. I like these list format blog posts, incidentally.

On the writing front, I've gathered a lot more ideas for what I'm calling Towers of the Sun, my homage to The Dark Tower and the Hyperion Cantos. I think I'm going to write the interior stories first and then the frame story to go around it.